New year brings healthy changes to mental health

Wednesday

Dec 18, 2013 at 12:01 AMDec 18, 2013 at 12:15 AM

By Ruth Z. Deming

The year 2013 has seen some remarkable progress in the area of mental health, thanks to the Obama administration. Vice President Biden announced an additional $100 million to improve access to mental health facilities.

The announcement came as the one-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting approached and with it the administration’s inability to pass significant gun laws.

Not surprisingly, the day before Sandy Hook’s first anniversary, another shooting took place, this time at a high school in Centennial, Colo.

We can now add 18-year-old Karl Pierson to the list of troubled killers in this America of ours where “Have gun, must shoot” has become a sad truism. Pierson, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, is no longer alive to tell his tale.

We’ll never forget the Columbine shootings, which took place only eight miles from Centennial. In a remarkable book, “Far From the Tree” by Andrew Solomon, the author interviewed the parents of the Columbine mastermind, Dylan Klebold. He told their story, which included the parents’ total ignorance of their son’s miserable, bullied life. The story is heartbreaking and shows the author’s compassion for the beleaguered parents of a son gone wrong.

“Far From the Tree” might also describe what happens to a perfectly happy and healthy family once mental illness strikes. “We don’t know what hit us!” is the oft-heard refrain from the members of New Directions, the support group I founded in 1986 for people with bipolar disorder and depression and their loved ones.

Suffering is inherent with bipolar disorder and depression. Let the poets speak. The late Jane Kenyon calls it “the mutilator of souls.” The more famous Sylvia Plath cries out: “I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness.”

Frankly, there is no hell like depression, as the members of our group can testify. Medication and psychotherapy work in the vast majority of cases, but when they don’t, many of our members have undergone the much-maligned electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). My friend Don has monthly maintenance treatments of ECT for his unremitting depression. Often a family disease, his older brother jumped to his death because of unbearable agony. Don consented to ECT when he lost everything — his job, his girlfriend, his friends — but is feeling so good he has started looking for work again.

Last month, we had a guest speaker who helped us learn about President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. While most of our members — they include schoolteachers, attorneys and college students — can afford insurance, mental illness stifles a person’s capacity to seek work. How can a person work when their leaden melancholia keeps them glued to their sickbed as if they had the flu. For these people, the Affordable Care Act is a godsend.

A friend of mine, Barb, who is insured under her husband’s policy, recently suffered her first bout of depression at the age of 45. No one is safe from depression. It can hit at any age, young or old.

“Now I understand what it’s like to be depressed,” she told me.

Over the phone, I told Barb she should rise from her bed and go outside and walk for 20 minutes. Indeed, the simple act of exercising was as good as any antidepressant.

We at New Directions believe in medication, psychotherapy and lifestyle changes to minimize episodes of mania (“highs”) and depression (“lows”), and anything else that works.

Vince, who has a job in information technology and is sending two of his four children to college, rises every morning and meditates in the quiet of his basement. He never felt quite right on medication, so with his doctor’s approval, he weaned off his bipolar meds. He swears the meditation works better than the drugs.

Half a dozen of our members are off meds, including myself. While we don’t advocate this for everyone, it is heartening to know the new paradigm is: Meds are not forever.

We also advocate keeping your illness to yourself. We are often asked in our small-group discussions, “Should I tell my potential employer that I have a mental illness?”

Certainly not, we counsel. Prejudice abounds, despite the list of celebrities who regularly “come out,” such as Catherine Zeta-Jones, Carrie Fisher and writer Virginia Woolf, who undoubtedly would not have taken her life in 1941 if medications had been available.

Here’s a challenge for you. Resolve in the new year to rethink your attitude toward those of us with mental illness. To one another, we are heroes. But we dare not speak of our illness in public, lest we be judged lesser than thou. Imagine! Prejudice because of a genetic quirk. Quite simply, it could have happened to you.

Ruth Z. Deming is a psychotherapist and founder/director of New Directions Support Group of Abington and Willow Grove — www.newdirectionssupport.org.

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